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Like the Doctor Himself, Infuriating and Unpredictable, July 20, 2014Originally written for the TRS-80 Model 1/Dick Smith System 80 and published in an Australian magazine for those machines it can be difficult to get the game running, as many of the disk images out there contain versions of the code set only for cassette use. This is a problem because the program must load a data file before it can run (a space saving technique for systems with only 16K of RAM). The original Cassette based Basic source must therefore be modified for disk use to get it to run on a disk system/emulator. See the following for an archived version of the original Micro-80 magazine article for some help with these issues:
https://archive.org/details/MICRO-80_Vol._3_Issue_08_1982-07_MICRO-80_AU
I have ported a version of this program to TRS-80 MC-10 which avoids this complexity.
The mapping of this program is very odd. Moving is non-logical. Reverse paths don't always take you back the way you came. Paths also double back in all kinds of strange ways that don't make geometric sense either. I originally thought this may have been a programming error on the original author's part (or my own part in porting the code to TRS-80 MC-10) but since playing it to completion (with the help of some excellent materials provided by Alex Dijktra over at solutionarchive) I have come to appreciate how it is actually a clever way to recreate a little bit of the creepy and mysterious atmosphere of the TV series. You won't like this game if you can't get into the spirit of this counter-intuitive navigation.
You also wont like this game unless you're the kind of adventurer who doesn't mind dealing lots of random elements affecting your possibilities of success (in puzzle solving, dealing with the NPCs you meet, as well as other aspects).
There are some unique commands such as: ENTER (takes you into the Tardis)
RESET (moves the Tardis to a new planet). SEARCH can accomplish quite a lot in certain rooms, but it is one of the many elements in the game affected by randomness, so multiple tries are necessary.
There are lots of NPCs in this game in the form of aliens who/that you can interact with in various useful or lethal ways. This is quite rare for Basic IF games under 16K RAM. I have found so few Basic adventures (at least that have easily accessible Basic source code) based on the Doctor Who theme (most Dr. Who adventures seem to be professional machine language affairs), which is part of my own fascination with this game. However, if you are simply a fan of interactive fiction and Doctor Who and not of the history of Basic text adventuring as such, you might want to give this one a miss.
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